said carefully, shocked by his revelations. Sympathy she didn’t dare reveal tore at her heart. “You’ve made something of yourself. Why should you care what anyone thinks about anything in Azalea Bend now? It’s history, Cole. Let it go.”
When he continued, it was as if he hadn’t heard her. His voice remained oddly flat and expressionless. “I realized I’d let her down, and I’d let down the man who loved me enough to give me his name. The least I could do is try to clear his—not for my sake, but for my mother’s. I began to research Aimee’s case. Reading documents, police reports. The court transcripts of your father’s trial. I read everything I could get my hands on, and one question stood out in my mind.”
Bryn’s uneasiness increased. His sheer matter of factness continued to prickle alarm up her spine.
She waited.
“My father’s face was scratched as if he’d been in a life-or-death struggle that night,” Cole went on. “The forensic report was strangely silent on this fact. Scrapings from Aimee’s nails should have linked those scratches to my father. But no such evidence was ever presented in court.”
“Forensic science was not the same then as it is today,” Bryn countered. “This was fifteen years ago, in a small town. We don’t have murders in St. Salome Parish on a regular basis. This wasn’t a conspiracy, Cole. It was a small town grappling with a big-city crime. If scrapings weren’t taken from beneath Aimee’s nails—”
“But scrapings were taken.”
“You just said—”
“I said the evidence wasn’t presented in court. I didn’t say the evidence didn’t exist.”
Chapter 4
Bryn swallowed thickly. “What do you mean?” Her voice was a gracile cloak masking unnamable trepidation.
Cole looked at her, his gaze suddenly as frightening as a hot summer storm. “I mean the scrapings were taken. And the evidence was suppressed. The information was removed from the forensic report.”
Bryn’s stomach muscles clenched. “How can you know this?”
“Because I contacted the coroner who autopsied Aimee’s body. I asked him why no scrapings had been taken.”
All the blood seemed to run out of Bryn’s head. She felt light, sick. She had to hear what Cole had to say, though. There was no stopping now.
“Randol Ormond is nearly eighty years old,” Cole told her. “But he’s got all his wits about him. He left Azalea Bend several years ago and now lives in a senior-care center in Tampa. He wasn’t hard to track down. I flew there, spoke with him face to face. And he told me the truth. He removed the evidence from Aimee’s report—though he wouldn’t tell me why or on whose authority. But I can guess.”
“Maybe he’s lying.” Even she knew her words sounded desperate.
“He doesn’t have long to live, Bryn. He’s got cancer. He has no reason to lie. The truth does nothing but stain his reputation. He’s been carrying a load of guilt for fifteen years, and he was only too ready to let it go.”
“Maybe he said what you wanted to hear. People change their stories sometimes. People lie for all kinds of reasons.”
“I know that only too well.” Cole’s quiet voice was jeapordous now. “You know as well as I do that your father had more than one reason to shoot mine. And that only one of those reasons would get him out of a jail sentence—and that was pinning Aimee’s murder on Wade Dempsey. A jury let Maurice Louvel off for taking a father’s justice. But a husband’s justice…That would have been a little more difficult to win, even for a Louvel.”
Bryn had to force her next words from numb lips. “Did you expect me to tell the world that my mother had an affair with your father? Even you didn’t believe it was true.” But oh, he had wanted her to say it anyway. And she’d refused. And he’d never forgiven her.
A stiff beat passed. “It never mattered what I believed about that, Bryn. It only mattered what your father believed. And you and I both know what he thought that night. We know he didn’t fire my father because of negligence on the job. He fired him because he suspected he’d slept with his wife. And when he found my father with Aimee, he shot him dead. After that, there was no backing down. If Wade Dempsey wasn’t a murderer, then Maurice Louvel was, wasn’t he, Bryn? The town came to Maurice Louvel’s rescue. Any evidence that pointed to someone else being Aimee’s killer was shoved away because the jury might not have been so sympathetic to the man on trial for murder. Not just the fact that your father had more than one motive to shoot mine. Now there’s more. Now there’s the forensic report that was suppressed—and who do you think suppressed it, Bryn?”
She felt more ill by the second. She knew where he was headed. Drake’s father, the prosecutor responsible for the case against her father. “That’s a loaded charge, Cole. And all you have is a grudge and the word of an old, dying man to back you up.”
“I have more than Randol Ormond’s word.” Suddenly the emotion in his eyes was too clear. And it wasn’t bitterness or anger. It was pain, pure and scorching. “He still had the original report in his private files, Bryn. He got his daughter to track it down and give it to me.”
She could barely breathe. “What does it say?”
“It says that the DNA beneath Aimee’s nails didn’t match my father’s.”
Her head reeled, and she grappled for perspective. What if Wade really hadn’t murdered Aimee? What if everything she’d believed all these years was wrong?
But everything else she knew about that night warred with Cole’s new evidence.
“Mistakes happen,” she whispered. There had to be another explanation—
“And so do lies.” His face twisted. “It’s too late for my mother’s peace of mind. I can’t do anything for her now. She died while I was in Tampa talking to Randol Ormond. But I can still clear my father’s name. Randol Ormond can’t be the only one in Azalea Bend who knew the truth about what happened. Someone else fought with Aimee that night, and that someone else fought with my father. I believe my father interrupted the killer, perhaps even tried to save Aimee. I’m here to find out who that was, Bryn. I won’t leave till I find out. And I need your help.”
Bryn’s heart tore. What Cole was suggesting was almost too horrible to contemplate. If there had been evidence to clear Wade Dempsey, evidence that had been suppressed to justify her father’s fatal act that night…
Blood roared in her ears. She didn’t want to believe any of this. It couldn’t be true. “I can’t help you.”
“Oh yes, Bryn, you can.”
She jerked back from the desk. Her chair hit the cabinet and she stood, bracing her weight as much as possible on her uninjured foot.
“My mother has been hurt enough. I’m not going to tell the world that she had an affair with your father to clear a dead man’s name. My mother doesn’t deserve any more pain. Whatever my father did or didn’t think that night doesn’t prove anything—”
Cole stopped her as she came around the desk. He rose to his feet, took hold
